Prince Paul Esterházy made his widow sole heir, and the Esterházy family lost Burgenland's largest estate to her foundations

In 1946 Paul V Esterházy, one of central Europe's richest men, married Melinda Ottrubay, prima ballerina of the Budapest Opera. Arrested at Christmas 1948, he was tried with Cardinal Mindszenty for a "monarchist conspiracy" and sentenced to 15 years. The Communists took his Hungarian land. Freed in the 1956 uprising, the couple fled west in a car disguised as a Red Cross vehicle and settled in Zurich. His Burgenland estates, returned after the Soviet withdrawal, he ran from there. On 21 August 1986 he made Melinda his universal heir. He died childless in May 1989. Melinda, worth an estimated 1.2 billion euros, became Austria's largest private landowner. From 1994 she put about 50,000 hectares, an eighth of Burgenland, plus Schloss Esterházy in Eisenstadt and Forchtenstein Castle, into three foundations. In 2002 her nephew Stefan Ottrubay took control. In 2007 relatives Endre and Christine Esterházy accused him before prosecutors of keeping Melinda from them; he sued them for defamation, and she said publicly she lived contentedly. She died in 2014. Paul-Anton Esterházy, son of the family head Anton, sued for Forchtenstein under a 1688 entail deed. On 11 June 2019 the Eisenstadt regional court dismissed the claim: naming Melinda sole heir showed Paul did not want the entail succession. Anton died on 22 September 2025. Since 2023 Ottrubay has chaired the supervisory board of Esterhazy Betriebe AG, which runs the foundations; no change is reported in 2026^†.